Frustration-based Metamaterials for Mechanical Memory and Response.

Physicists have designed metamaterials with built-in frustration that have a point or line where the material doesn't deform under stress and remember how they have been poked or squeezed in the past. The design principle, called non-orientable order, could be used in robotics and mechanical computers, while similar principles could be used in quantum computers. The researchers 3D-printed their own mechanical metamaterial structures based on rings of squares connected by hinges at their corners, which exhibit the same frustrated and non-orientable behavior as Möbius strips.